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76 PART 2 CAPTURING MARKETING INSIGHTS

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Marketing InsightInsight
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Finding Gold at the Bottom

of the Pyramid

Business writer C.K. Prahalad believes much innovation can come
from developments in emerging markets such as China and India. He
estimates there are 5 billion unserved and underserved people at the
so-called “bottom of the pyramid.” One study showed that 4 billion
people live on $2 or less a day. Firms operating in those markets have
had to learn how to do more with less.
In Bangalore, India, Narayana Hrudayalaya Hospital charges a flat
fee of $1,500 for heart bypass surgery that costs 50 times as much in
the United States. The hospital has low labor and operating expenses
and an assembly-line view of care that has specialists focus on their
own area. The approach works—the hospital’s mortality rates are half
those of U.S. hospitals. Narayana also operates on hundreds of infants
for free and profitably insures 2.5 million poor Indians against serious
illness for 11 cents a month. machine for rural China, it began to sell them in the United States.
Overseas firms are also finding creative solutions in developing Nestlé repositioned its low-fat Maggi brand dried noodles—a popular,
countries. In Brazil, India, Eastern Europe, and other markets, Microsoft low-priced meal for rural Pakistan and India—as a budget-friendly
launched its pay-as-you-go FlexGo program, which allows users to pre- health food in Australia and New Zealand.
pay to use a fully loaded PC only for as long as wanted or needed without
Sources: C.K. Prahalad, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid (Upper
having to pay the full price the PC would normally command. When the Saddle River, NJ: Wharton School Publishing, 2010); Bill Breen, “C.K. Prahalad:
payment runs out, the PC stops operating and the user prepays again to Pyramid Schemer,” Fast Company, March 2007, p. 79; Pete Engardio, “Business
Prophet: How C.K. Prahalad Is Changing the Way CEOs Think,” BusinessWeek,
restart it.
January 23, 2006, pp. 68–73; Reena Jane, “Inspiration from Emerging
Other firms find “reverse innovation” advantages by developing Economies,” BusinessWeek, March 23 and 30, 2009, pp. 38–41; Jeffrey R.
products in countries like China and India and then distributing them Immelt, Vijay Govindarajan, and Chris Trimble, “How GE Is Disrupting Itself,”
Harvard Business Review, October 2009, pp. 56–65; Peter J. Williamson and
globally. After GE successfully introduced a $1,000 handheld electro-
Ming Zeng, “Value-for-Money Strategies for Recessionary Times,” Harvard
cardiogram device for rural India and a portable, PC-based ultrasound Business Review, March 2009, pp. 66–74.

older. Some marketers focus on cohorts, groups of individuals born during the same time period
who travel through life together. The defining moments they experience as they come of age and
become adults (roughly ages 17 through 24) can stay with them for a lifetime and influence their
values, preferences, and buying behaviors.

ETHNIC AND OTHER MARKETS Ethnic and racial diversity varies across countries. At one
extreme is Japan, where almost everyone is Japanese; at the other is the United States, where nearly
25 million people—more than 9 percent of the population—were born in another country. As of the
2000 census, the U.S. population was 72 percent White, 13 percent African American, and 11 percent
Hispanic. The Hispanic population has been growing fast and is expected to make up 18.9 percent of
the population by 2020; its largest subgroups are of Mexican (5.4 percent), Puerto Rican (1.1 percent),
and Cuban (0.4 percent) descent. Asian Americans constituted 3.8 percent of the U.S. population;
Chinese are the largest group,followed by Filipinos,Japanese,Asian Indians,and Koreans,in that order.
The growth of the Hispanic population represents a major shift in the nation’s center of gravity.
Hispanics made up half of all new workers in the past decade and will account for 25 percent of